Ransom (6 page)

The alternative to this drab semi-employment was to accept the money his father continued to offer, and this was what kept Ransom going in the teaching business. He didn't want the old man's baksheesh. From time to time he still sent checks, which Ransom kept in an unread book in the bottom of a drawer.

Among the disadvantages of small quarters was not having room to work out. Saturday was officially a day of rest for the dojo, but in order to be merely competent Ransom had to be fanatic. After an hour of essays, he changed into sweats and rode the Honda down to the gym, an ugly
prewar box with a peeling concrete skin. The smell inside was forty years of sweat and ammonia. Ransom greeted acquaintances as he walked among the scattered barbells and dumbbells. The gym had one Universal; otherwise it was just a matter of finding a bar and slapping on the weight.

He took a jump rope out back to the parking lot. After half an hour of cals and stretching he went over to the punching post—a four-by-four wrapped in hemp at fist level. He did fifty and fifty. After two years of this, the skin splitting and scarring over again and again, the right hand was tough enough that he barely felt the impact. The more sensitive left still bled every time.

He went back inside to bench press, beginning at sixty kilos and working up to a hundred. He had started toward the Universal when someone threw an arm around his neck and pulled him back hard.

You're dead
.

Ransom planted a foot behind him, struggling for leverage, but the arm tightened and drew him farther back, off-balance. He was fighting in earnest for air, couldn't move, then was released.

You never know
, the sensei said,
when I'll be behind you. Coming out of your house in the morning, rounding a corner downtown. I might be waiting underwater in the bath
.

Ransom bowed and nodded, trying to catch his breath.

What are you doing lifting weights?
the sensei asked.
Too much weight-lifting will stiffen you up and slow you down. I told you this. You're stiff and slow already
.

Excuse me, sensei
.

Do you have your gi?
the sensei asked.

When Ransom said he did, the sensei told him to put it on, he would show him some moves. But he couldn't, he said, show Ransom how to see.

When Ransom showed up at Buffalo Rome on Saturday night, Miles Ryder was waiting for him. They retreated into the office.

“I want to rearrange his face,” Ryder said. “I am going to make a study of methods of inflicting pain and suffering.”

“How do you know DeVito did it?”

“Get serious. Who the fuck else is going to trash my bike? Okies love to beat on things.”

“Did you file a report?”

“I told 'em. Not that it'll make a difference.”

“What do you propose to do if he shows up?”

“Eventually call an ambulance.”

Ransom hoped DeVito wouldn't show, since nothing good came of Texas–Oklahoma blood feuds. From his seat at the bar he kept an eye on the door. Possibly he could head DeVito off before Ryder spotted him. But Miles was also watching the door as he talked to a few friends at a table, and Ransom suspected that DeVito had devolved some blame for last night's disgrace onto him as well.

Dana the Potter joined Ransom briefly. He had been snowbound for most of the winter at a kiln town in the
mountains, making the same tea bowl over and over. Laboring over the wheel, referring to a model shaped by his sensei, Dana regularly presented a new bowl to the sensei, who examined each one briefly before ordering him to squash it down to clay and start afresh. Ever since the roads opened Dana had been bingeing in Kyoto. In a few weeks Dana would go back to the kiln and beg his sensei's pardon and then they would not see him again for several months; meanwhile he would talk to anyone who listened. What Ransom thought remarkable was that, after two years in a small village where no one spoke English, Dana did not speak Japanese. Talking to Ransom, he made large, pot-shaping gestures with his hands, as if unaccustomed to having his words understood. Ransom wondered what he was doing up in those hills besides learning how to make a tea bowl, suspecting that Dana's program was not so different from his own.

Mojo Domo was onstage. Kano was singing about a woman who had done him wrong, his face sweaty and twisted with apparent pain. The worst blues, Ransom thought, was the hurt you carried after you did someone wrong.

A man standing near Ransom in puffy Chiang Mai hill tribe pants kept looking him over. When the set ended and Dana cleared out, he took the vacant stool. “What's happening?” he said, then pointed at Ransom's callused hand. “Karate, am I right?”

Ransom said, “India, am I right?”

The man smiled like an aspiring saint and said, yes, he'd been there. He had that look of curiosity which has been sated, a long-distance gaze which had stretched so far it
finally snapped and turned back on itself. Either drugs or religion. Asia burn. He had seen things, and he would tell you all about them while leaving the impression that he was holding back something larger and more profound.
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee
. Sufic mysteries, corpses burning on the ghats of Benares, eternity in a grain of Thai heroin.

“Just arrive?” Ransom said. Feeling he'd heard it all before, he was hoping to keep it short.

“Three days. Flew into Tokyo and I mean I couldn't get out of there fast enough. It reminded me of this dream I had in Lahore. I was inside this beehive—terrified, right? All around me these giant bees with like TV antennas on their heads. But I kept moving deeper and deeper into the beehive 'cause I was looking for something. Then it comes to me, right? That there's no honey in the hive.
I
know it but the bees
don't
. They kept building these wax things—
cells
, fucking
cells
, right? Think about
that
for a minute. But they'd forgotten the original purpose. That's what was frightening. That's what Tokyo was like.”

The movement of his face and his body seemed weirdly out of sync. His hands were in constant motion and his shoulders jumped at odd intervals, but the face remained sleepy and serene. The smoke from his Indonesian clove cigarette was beginning to irritate Ransom's eyes.

“We've forgotten the original purpose,” he said. “We've forgotten the honey.”

“What honey?”

“
That's
the question, isn't it?” He smiled at Ransom as if they were co-conspirators. “From the Zen point of view, it has no name. The Hindus have exactly one thousand
names for it. In Hebrew the name is a secret that can't be spoken and that's only known to a few initiates at any one time. But it's within us all.”

“Right.” Ransom had heard enough.

“Hey, have you ever hung out in Goa? I feel like I've seen you.”

Ransom shook his head.

“Sri Lanka?”

“Nope.”

“I have this like image of you on a beach.”

“I'm not really the beach type.”

“I'm a writer,” he said. “I try to observe everything wherever I am.”

“What do you write?”

“Apocrypha. The unauthorized version. You've probably seen some of my stuff here and there. Carl Digger's the byline.”

Ransom shrugged.

“You're thinking, what about
Rolling Stone
, right? In your view a hip mag, a forum for the unexpurgated stuff. Forget it. They're government-CIA operated. Why do
you
think they do all those pieces on celeb interior designers and four-star restaurants?
Hey
, General Westmoreland doesn't want you thinking about what he's up to.”

“I don't think you're going to like Japan,” Ransom said.

“Why not?”

“Lacks the landscape of Nepal and the epic spectacle of India. It's a small-screen culture. You've got to be a miniaturist to appreciate it.”

“There's a story here,” Digger said. “A big story.” He paused. “You're not a writer, are you?”

“Don't even write letters home,” Ransom said.

Carl Digger nodded. He looked around with an air of suspicion, then leaned closer. “I was in Thailand when I heard about this monster strain of Vietnamese clap. You've heard about this, right? Gonzo gonorrhea. A clap that eats penicillin for breakfast. These U.S. Army doctors hit it with everything they had and it just kept on coming. So, what to do? Send the boys back home to infect our daughters and sisters? Not fucking likely. So what are the options? You could kill them. Killed, missing in action, that's what the letters home would say. Hey, the U.S. military's done worse things. Anyway, there were rumors to that effect. The
Barb
ran a piece in 'seventy-two, interview with a GI who said his buddy vanished from the infirmary.
They
said he was transferred to a hospital stateside. A week later, word comes down he's officially missing in action. Like, what action? Vicious sponge bath from one of the nurses? This was
not
an isolated case.”

He pulled a small vial from one of his large pockets and shook out a pill. “Lomotil,” he said. “When you do India you sacrifice your lower intestine to the gods in the water.”

And some, Ransom thought, sacrifice their gray matter to the gods in the hash pipe. “I don't see what your story has to do with Japan.”

“Hey, how could you? They don't
want
you to see. When I started checking into this thing, there were no end of leads, rumors, whispers, but one kept coming up. The specificity of place, the fact that unconnected people had the same story—this was something.” He leaned still closer; Ransom could feel his breath. “An island in the Inland Sea, somewhere off the coast of Shikoku. That's
where they're keeping the boys. The island's patrolled by U.S. Navy gunboats disguised as trawlers, no communications links with the outside world. I've talked to people who have talked to Japanese fishermen. Some fishing boat picked up an American in those waters, one of the clap carriers, and he's hiding out on a farm in Shikoku.” He sat back and took a drag of clove. “I'm going to find him.”

“Good luck,” Ransom said, holding out his hand to shake by way of ending the conversation.

Digger shook the proffered hand as if he were out of practice. “You haven't heard anything about this?”

“Only rumors.”

“Nothing specific?”

“No. But I'll tell you this much. One of the great things about Japan is that nobody can use that excuse about catching it from a toilet seat.”

“Why not?”

“No seats.”

“Oh, right.” Digger wasn't sure whether to laugh or not.

Ransom excused himself for purposes of using a standard international urinal. He stood up and shook Digger's hand one last time. “Have you ever run across a guy named Ian?” Ransom asked. “Ian Haxton. Tall guy with red hair?”

Digger repeated the name several times, nodding his head gravely.

“In Goa, maybe, or Katmandu?” Ransom said.

“Hold on. Red hair, plays the sitar. Great sitar player. Scottish, right? Real heavy accent?”

Ransom shook his head.

“Pretty heavy accent. Maybe not so noticeable.”

“See you around,” Ransom said. He knew it was a long shot, but he always asked.

When he was halfway down the bar, Digger called out after him: “Kuta Beach, Bali?”

“What?”

“Did I see you there?”

“Not in this life,” Ransom said.

When Ransom returned, Digger was gone. Kano was sitting in Ransom's seat, looking as if he had just run a marathon.

“My man,” Kano said.

Ransom slapped him five.

“How was the set?” Kano asked.

“Bad sounds, Kano.”

“Bad?”

“Bad as in
badass
. It means good.”

Kano asked the bartender for a pencil. He scrawled a note, then looked up. “What does
good
mean?”

“I don't know. I really couldn't tell you.”

“But
bad
means good?”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Another question, please. We're working up a new tune. What do you think it means? ‘Tired of Fattening Frogs for Snakes.'”

“That's the name of the song?”

Kano nodded.

“Sounds to me like his woman has been stepping out and he's sick of it.”

“She's got a back-door man?”

“I'd say.”

“Like, another mule's been kicking in his stall?”

“Same idea.”

Kano made another note.

“How's it shaking in general?” Ransom said.

“No fucking bread, man. My lady lost her job. She was, what do you say, a waitress. Person who waits out front in office.”

“Receptionist.”

“Right. Some asshole from office comes here one night, sees her with me and the guys. Goes back to office and says, this don't be the kind of bitch we want working in our nice office. So that's all she wrote.”

“They can't do that,” Ransom said.

“‘Course they do that. This is Japan. That's how it works.”

“She should get a lawyer,” Ransom said.

“This ain't America, man.” Ransom knew what he meant. “What are you drinking?”

Ransom said he was drinking tea.

“You on the wagon train?”

“I'm not on anything,” Ransom said.

“Okay, sorry.”

A schoolgirl wearing a
Playboy
sweatshirt approached Kano and whispered in his ear. “She wants your autograph,” Kano said, as the girl held out a small spiral-bound book. She kept her eyes fastened to her feet. The book, presumably a diary, had bunny rabbits on the cover and except for short handwritten entries was blank inside.

Ransom signed with bold indecipherable strokes. The girl took the notebook and bobbed up and down in thanks, excusing herself over and over. From a nearby table her
friends watched and giggled, covering their mouths with their hands.